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Budget blues, selling pressure grip market; pivotals dip; Sensex goes under 3200

The Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex fell below the psychological barrier of 3200 points following a sharp decline in the pivotals on speculative selling pressure coupled with lack of buying interest from institutional investors on the first day of the current settlement today.

The market witnessed all-round selling pressure. Barring a few scrips like NIIT, Thomas Cook, Digital Equipment, Burrough's Welcome, ITC, Zee, Reckit and Coleman, most of the prominent shares suffered a sharp decline today.

Reflecting the bearish phase, the 30-scrip BSE Sensex opened at 3253.93 points, touched the day's high of 3280.63 points, fell below the important mark of 3200 to touch the day's low of 3182.47 points, before closing at 3183.64 points, showing a net loss of 31.71 points over Friday's close of 3215.35 points.

The broad-based BSE-100 index dropped by 13.13 points to 1398.96 points as against the previous close of 1412.09 points.

Vasudeo Joshi, assistant director, Jardine Fleming Asset Management Company, said the nervousness in the market was likely to continue till the presentation of Budget. "People had outstanding position of over Rs 1 billion and therefore purchases are unlikely to be made in the coming days," Joshi added.

According to a report, the world stock markets witnessed a mixed trend with the Hang-Seng index at Hong Kong down by 50.6 points to 9139.6 points while the Nikkei index at Tokyo registered a handsome increase of 94.41 points to 13992.49 points over the previous close.

The FTSE-100 index at London reported decline fo 41 points at 5183.08 immediately after the opening, dealers said.

Back home, the provisional closing figures indicated that scrips from infotech, pharma, FMCG, banks and telecom have reported sharp decline during the course of trading.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices eased by 2.67 and 1.05 points to 324.71 and 127.29 points as against the previous close of 327.38 and 128.34 points respectively.

After a firm start, pivotals declined gradually, registering a sharp fall compared to their day's high, dealers said.

Total turnover on the BOLT system stood at Rs 13.29 billion. Tobacco giant ITC topped the list of turnover by registering highest turnover of Rs 2.53 billion followed by Pentafour Software Rs 2.50 billion and Satyam Computers Rs 819.7 million.

Other actively traded counters were Telco (Rs 492.9 million), Zee Telefilms (Rs 415.3 million), Castrol India (Rs 399.3 million), Tata Tea (Rs 395.2 million), Reliance (Rs 372.7 million), NIIT (Rs 307.5 million), SBI (Rs 264.8 million), Tisco (Rs 237.3 million), MTNL (Rs 185.4 million), Dr Reddy's (Rs 174.6 million), Digital Equipment (Rs 171.5 million) and Infosys Technologies (Rs 171.5 million).

UNI

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